Europe's Long Legal Tether on Russia
Court of Human Rights a Powerful Check on Excesses, Abuses
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, October 23, 2006
For seven years, the Salvation Army battled a ruling by Moscow city authorities that the Christian charitable group, whose members wear uniforms and call their leader a general, was a foreign "paramilitary organization" that must cease operations in the capital.
Each step of the way in Russia's courts, the Salvation Army lost. In 2000, a Moscow court, noting the group's "barrack-room discipline," suggested it might involve itself in the violent overthrow of the state, court records show. [..]
This month, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the city of Moscow had interfered with the group's freedom of religion and assembly. The Salvation Army's structure and norms were "particular ways of organizing the internal life of their religious community," the court said, and "it could not seriously be maintained that the applicant branch advocated a violent change of constitutional foundations."
Suddenly, the stance of Moscow officialdom changed. "Because of the ruling, we must register them, and we will," an official in Moscow's registration office said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
While President Vladimir Putin has been marginalizing Russia's parliament, opposition, media and human rights groups, this international court sitting 1,250 miles away in Strasbourg, France, has emerged as a powerful check on the excesses of the Russian bureaucracy and failures by the country's own investigative organs and courts to follow Russia's laws.
The European Court enforces the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, drawn up by the Council of Europe, an international body founded in the wake of World War II to defend human rights, parliamentary democracy and the rule of law. Russia ratified the convention in 1998, agreeing to accept the court's decisions as binding.
"Much of what you see in the Russian justice system harks back to Soviet days," said Carroll Bogert, associate director of Human Rights Watch. "If you're a human rights group, you can report on human rights excesses or publicize abuses in the press or meet with government officials, but it's hard to make a dent. One of the really effective tools now is the European Court, and it produces tangible and immediate results."
Bogert noted that in August Russia halted the deportation of 13 Uzbeks to their home country, where they faced a real risk of torture or execution, after the men appealed to the European Court. The former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan, which is not a member of the Council of Europe, ignored international appeals not to send Uzbeks home, and the fate of the men it deported remains unknown.
Following European Court decisions in recent years, Russia improved conditions in pretrial detention centers and trimmed the powers of federal or local authorities to reopen ostensibly completed cases that they have lost in domestic courts. Torture victims have been compensated, and in at least one case, police officers were jailed for abuse after the Strasbourg court took up the matter.
"The court represents the end of impunity," said Olga Shepeleva, a lawyer with Demos, a human rights research center in Moscow. "There's a growing recognition that the court is a place where justice will be done. The authorities may not always be happy, but they pay attention to the results."
The European Court has entered Russian popular consciousness as a port of last resort for those seeking justice because the Russian state does bow to its judgments -- albeit with some very public grumbling.
While Russia is quick to pay any compensation ordered by the court, the country has been criticized by the Council of Europe's parliamentary assembly for failing to carry out systemic and deep reforms as a result of court rulings. On Chechnya in particular, human rights activists say they would like to see a dramatic improvement in the pursuit of soldiers and officials responsible for atrocities.
"We consider some rulings of the European Court to be politicized," Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told journalists in Strasbourg this month. Russia currently chairs the Council of Europe. "But I repeat that despite the fact that we do not agree with certain rulings of the court in principle, we do comply with them."
Russians now file more complaints with the court -- 10,583 in 2005 -- than people from any of the 46 countries that make up the Council of Europe, according to court statistics. The vast majority of these cases will never be heard because the court is overwhelmed with potential plaintiffs, receiving more than 45,000 petitions last year.
Since 2002, the court has issued 362 judgments concerning Russia -- on issues ranging from environmental degradation to, most recently, abductions, disappearances and killings in Chechnya [..]. All but 10 judgments have gone against Russia, according to court statistics. [..]
"The Russian authorities care about the Council of Europe and the court, and they take it seriously," [Ole Solvang, executive director of the Russian Justice Initiative in Moscow,] said. "We see that in our cases. There is a complete change in attitude towards a case, a disappearance case, for example, when the government learns the case has been filed with the European Court."
For Alexei Mikheyev, redress came even before the court ruled. In 1998, he was subjected to nine days of torture, including electric shock, in a local police station after being picked up as a suspect in the disappearance of a 17-year-old girl in the central Russian city of Nizhniy Novgorod.
Mikheyev confessed to raping and killing the girl but retracted his statement after he was taken to the prosecutor's office. Returned to the police station and facing more torture, he threw himself out of a third-story window and was left partially paralyzed. The girl he had confessed to killing returned home the next day.
Prosecutors opened and then dropped 23 preliminary investigations into the police force's treatment of Mikheyev, in what human rights activists call an effort to stymie any trial. After the European Court agreed to hear Mikheyev's case in 2004, prosecutors reopened the case and finally secured the conviction of two police officers, who were given four-year sentences for abuse of power. In January, Mikheyev was awarded approximately $300,000 in compensation. [..]
Shepeleva, one of the lawyers who represented Mikheyev, said charges of police abuse in Nizhniy Novgorod reportedly declined after the ruling.
Russia lost its first case on Chechnya in early 2005. The court found that relatives of two plaintiffs, Magomed Khashiyev and Roza Akayeva, had been tortured and killed by Russian troops in 2000, and it called the investigation "seriously flawed and delayed." In two other cases, the court ruled that relatives of four Chechen plaintiffs had been killed by indiscriminate airstrikes.
The six plaintiffs were awarded compensation, which the Russian government paid promptly.
When it loses a case, the government is obliged to write an action plan laying out how it will rectify the failings identified by the court and prevent recurrences. In a submission to the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe, which monitors implementation of court decisions, Russian officials wrote that they had reopened investigations into all three Chechen cases, were educating troops on human rights law and were circulating the court's decisions to judges and prosecutors.
But lawyers for the plaintiffs, while welcoming the reopening of the cases, say they want to see particular officers, named by the court in its decision, brought to justice. They also want the Russian army to change its basic manual, which contains no concept of proportionality regarding the use of force when civilians are at risk.
Instead, the manual reads, "Shame on the commander who, fearing responsibility, fails to act and does not involve all forces, measures and possibilities for achieving victory in battle."
"No one has been punished," Tatyana Kasatkina, executive director of the leading Russian human rights group, Memorial, said of the Chechen cases. "Long-lasting and slow criminal cases have been opened, but I doubt those responsible will be given up." [..]
But on balance, activists praise the leverage they get from the Strasbourg rulings. "Our authorities have started to move faster," Kasatkina said. "They understand that there is a body above our courts which can make real decisions and attract international attention to problems, so it will keep them tense and responsive."
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